Nine people came before the Cook County board of commissioners during the public comment period of the board’s Feb. 26 meeting to give their views about the proposed (estimated) $5 million jail addition.
Last year the county hired WOLD, an architectural firm to conduct a facilities study and they recommended expanding the jail so it could be upgraded from phase 1 to a phase 3 lockup.
The current jail can only hold prisoners for three days before they have to be sent to a phase 3 jail, where they can be held longterm and, among other things, detainees are provided with mental health services if needed.
Arvis Thompson asked, in light of the Human Development Center (HDC) closing, if the county would have to hire mental health staff to work at the expanded jail?
Pam Dorris said she recently read that a “vocal minority” was often speaking against public policy at the commissioner meetings. If commissioners feel that way, she said, they could be making a serious mistake in believing that there aren’t a lot of people in the county who are worried about the way the county spends its tax dollars.
Dorris said she had spoken to sheriff Pat Eliasen and asked him what the usual offense(s) people were jailed for were. He responded that people were most commonly incarcerated for alcohol-, drug-related, or spousal abuse crimes.
With 1-3 detainees per day, and expenses going down over the last few years, Dorris said, “We don’t need a class 3 jail,” and suggested a minor renovation to the building and better accommodations for female prisoners was all that is needed.
She also said the jail wasn’t “Hazelton,” and added the county could look at buying Hill Haven, the former assisted housing facility now on the market, and take people who needed mental health help there instead of putting them in jail, and working with the hospital/clinic to provide mental health services to those inmates.
Ben Peters came with numbers and information he has gained over the past few months of studying the jail expansion. He has worked with sheriff Pat Eliasen and the Minnesota Department of Corrections, as well as read pertinent information about why jails should – or should not – expand, he said.
One of the biggest reasons the county has argued adding more cells and upgrading from phase 1 to a phase 3 jail is because of the high cost to transfer prisoners to long-term holding facilities.
Citing an Arrowhead Regional Development Commission (ARDC) study which looked at the money Cook County spent to send prisoners out of the county from 2015 through 2018, Peters said the county spent $220,652 in 2015; $141,475.37 in 2016; $111,154.17 in 2017; and $90,382 through 11 months in 2018.
The Minnesota Department of Corrections report issued in 2016 for 2015 reported that Cook County had 1.56 inmates per day, said Peters. The current reported prisoner average is 1.5 to 3 per day, but WOLD projects in 2020 the average number will rise to 14 prisoners per day.
“Something is wrong with those numbers,” Peters said.
Rather than “pushing a narrative to push for expansion,” Peters suggested fixing the current jail and forgetting about the expansion. He also said after the meeting that the only way that the WOLD prisoner projection could be valid is if the county imported criminals from other counties to do their time here.
Lloyd Speck said that nationally and statewide jail studies are suggesting facilities get smaller, not bigger.
“Why are we ignoring the fact that inmate transfers are dropping?” He asked rhetorically.
The jail was built in the 1990s, and Speck said that by county building standards the jail wasn’t old. He also cited the YMCA building, which was constructed in 2013 and now needs a lot of repair and upgrades to bring it up to an acceptable standard, and said the county was spending too much money on building projects it didn’t need.
Bob Mattson brought up the national push to decrease incarcerations, adding that the St. Louis County sheriff wanted fewer jails. “Why does Cook County want to be counter to that?”
Bruce Martinson had two concerns with building a phase 3 jail. His primary concern was that Cook County couldn’t provide the same training and rehabilitation services a more extensive facility could provide, especially job training for inmates who are incarcerated for an extended period.
Only two years in the county, Gordon Salisbury said he and his wife had been following county politics for the past eight years before moving here. He said it made no sense to him for the county to push a jail expansion with the small population and few people who are incarcerated at any one time.
By going to a phase 3 jail, Gordon said the county would have to hire psychologists and sociologists to work there. “Based on the census data, these professionals would be sitting on their thumbs 99 percent of the time.” He also added that with pot becoming legal, the jail would have even less population.
Brad Thompson asked about the shoddy workmanship at the YMCA, and asked if the buildings were being properly inspected? With the county spending money to hire architects and engineers from out of town, he also questioned why all of the buildings were falling apart? “I don’t see a need for a jail expansion,” he added. Then proclaimed, “I have to go to work. I can’t afford a razor right now,” he said as he got up and left.
At age 20, Colton Thompson was the youngest member of the audience to speak. He is currently shoveling snow from rooftops, and as he has worked his clients, he said, often talked about how disgruntled they were about the high cost of taxes in the county.
He cited the $80,000 study for the Hovland garage and asked if the people conducting the study had talked to any of the workers out there to see what they felt needed to be done. They said that money could have been better put to use hiring a local sheetrock contractor and a local electrician to do the required upgrade in the wiring. He said he wasn’t in favor of making the jail bigger and also questioned whether the county needed a county administrator, adding that since that position was added, the county had embarked on a significant spending spree.
When the speakers were done board chair Ginny Storlie thanked them for appearing before the commissioners and said that if they had any questions to call or email their commissioners.
A public meeting will be held March 21 at 6 p.m. in the Cook County commissioners’ room to discuss the proposed jail expansion.
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